Qualitative study exploring barriers and facilitators to progression for female medical clinical academics: interviews with female associate professors and professors

The level of the gender gap in academic publishing varies by country and region of affiliation: A cross-sectional study of articles published in general medical journals

BACKGROUND

Women are generally under-represented as authors of publications, and especially as last authors, but this under-representation may not be uniformly distributed across countries. We aimed to document by country and region the proportion of female authors (PFA) in high-impact general medical journals.

METHODS

We used PyMed, a Python library that provides access to PubMed, to retrieve all PubMed articles published between January 2012 and December 2021 in the fifty general internal medicine journals with the highest 2020 impact factor according to Journal Citation Reports. We extracted first/last authors' main country of affiliation for all these articles using regular expressions and manual search, and grouped the countries into eight regions (North/Latin America, Western/Eastern Europe, Asia, Pacific, Middle East, and Africa). We used NamSor to determine first/last authors' gender and computed the PFA for each country/region.

RESULTS

We retrieved 163,537 publications for first authors and 135,392 for last authors. Gender could be determined for 160,891 and 133,373 publications, respectively. The PFA was 41% for first authors and 33% for last authors, but it varied widely by country (first authors: >50% for eight countries, maximum = 63% in Romania, minimum = 19% in Japan; last authors: >50% for two countries, maximum = 53% in Romania, minimum = 9% in Japan). The PFA also varied by region. It was highest for Eastern Europe (first authors = 53%, last authors = 40%), and lowest for Asia (36% and 29%) and the Middle East (35% and 27%).

CONCLUSION

We found that the PFA varied widely by country and region, and was lowest in Asia, particularly Japan, and the Middle East. The under-representation of women as authors of publications, especially in these two regions, needs to be addressed and correcting persistent gender discrimination in research should be a top priority.

Why are women still leaving academic medicine? A qualitative study within a London Medical School

OBJECTIVES

To identify factors that influenced women who chose to leave academic medicine.

DESIGN AND MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

Independent consultants led a focus group of women in medicine who had left academia after completion of their postgraduate research degree at Imperial College London Faculty of Medicine. Thematic analysis was performed on the transcribed conversations.

PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING

Nine women physicians who completed a postgraduate degree (MD or PhD) at a large London Medical School and Academic Health Sciences Centre, Imperial College London, but did not go on to pursue a career in academic medicine.

RESULTS

Influences to leave clinical academia were summarised under eight themes-career intentions, supervisor support, institutional human resources support, inclusivity, work-life balance, expectations, mentors and role models, and pregnancy and maternity leave.

CONCLUSION

The women in our focus group reported several factors contributing to their decision to leave clinical academia, which included lack of mentoring tailored to specific needs, low levels of acceptance for flexible working to help meet parental responsibilities and perceived explicit gender biases. We summarise the multiple targeted strategies that Imperial College London has implemented to promote retention of women in academic medicine, although more research needs to be done to ascertain the most effective interventions.